Internet Explorer @ Learnosity

Over the last 18 months one of the hot topics at Learnosity has been support for older versions of Internet Explorer. It was around this time last year that the rumours of Microsoft dropping Internet Explorer and launching the new Windows 10 operating system with an entirely new browser started.

As of January 12, 2016, Microsoft will only support the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system. All other versions will no longer be eligible for technical support nor security updates to fix vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malware. In a nutshell, IE 8 is no longer supported at all and IE 9 will only be supported on Windows Vista.

In line with Microsoft’s plans to drop support for IE 8 and 9 over the coming months, we believe that it is in the best interests of our users to follow suit. Removing support for these legacy browsers will allow us to focus on delivering new and more innovative improvements to our entire product suite. It will allow us to develop advanced features which would be difficult if not impossible to fully support in older browsers which in turn will provide a better, more authentic experience for students and educators. Upgrading to a newer browser version will also offer end users improved security, increased performance, better backward compatibility as well as support for the modern technologies that power today’s websites and services.

Before taking this decision we examined our own internal analytics to see what impact this step would have on our users. In wake of the original Microsoft announcement in August 2014, IE 8 usage has dropped rapidly over the last 17 months and between September and November 2015 IE 9 and IE 8 represented 0.17% and 0.04% respectively of our overall user base.

We know that getting your users to upgrade can sometimes be a difficult and time consuming process. So to ensure we support all our clients equally, as of Jan 13th 2016 all latest versions of the Learnosity APIs can be used with IE8 and 9. Any patches to these versions will also have support for IE8 and IE9.

Version control on the Learnosity APIs means that this move will not unduly affect our clients as it will always be possible for an existing client to choose to pin to an API version which was tested on IE 8 and/or IE 9. However new API versions will not be tested in IE 8 or IE 9.

If you have any concerns please feel free to get in touch with your technical support team who’ll be happy to provide guidance in relation to migrating to a more modern browser and answer any questions you may have.